Four years ago, I signed up for a Twitter account. I went through the typical new user hatching process. For a year, I didn’t get it. I barely logged in. When I tweeted, it was about how the Twitter website was down. But eventually I started following someone interesting. Then another. Some followed back… Conversations, Retweets, and the iPhone client happened… After a while, seemingly everyone in the valley had a Twitter account, and plenty were using it as their identity. I too clicked the little blue bird more and more frequently. I was hooked.
Two years ago, a Twitter recruiter contacted me. I went on to interview rounds with amazing, crazy, smart people. The energy was palpable, and I was psyched by the opportunity. Twitter was the hot startup that everyone wanted to join. I was offered a job, and I accepted. I picked the red pill, and got to see how far the rabbit hole goes.
Continue reading
The page was initially released to the general public on April 5th, 2011. Sadly an unrelated bug surfaced, causing all #newTwitter features (including this homepage) to be turned off. The new homepage had to be taken down after only a few hours, but was up long enough for us to collect valuable performance data, and to observe the overwhelmingly positive initial reactions from users and the press. On the 20th, after a couple bugfixes and optimizations, the page was re-enabled for all users. It’s interesting to see the spikes in tweets mentioning twitter home page for the month of April, they logically match up with the releases.